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An anonymous reader writes that XWayland is nearly ready to be merged into the main X.org tree "X.Org Server 1.16 this summer should support XWayland, the means of allowing X11 applications to run atop Wayland-based compositors without the need for any application/game changes. With the revised design, XWayland has generic 2D acceleration over OpenGL and a cleaner design compared to earlier revisions. With GNOME 3.12 having better Wayland support and Plasma Next around the corner, it looks like 2014 could be the year of Wayland's take-off!"
The patch series emails have more details. The big news here is that XWayland is ditching its old DDX model for one based on Glamor. eliminating the need for any X.org drivers to be written to support X11 on Wayland: "Finally, the last patch adds the Xwayland DDX. Initially Xwayland was an
Xorg module that exposed an API for Xorg video drivers to hook into
so that we could reuse the native 2D acceleration. Now that glamor is
credible and still improving, a much better approach is to make Xwayland
its own DDX and use glamor for acceleration. A lot of the code in the Xorg
approach was busy preventing Xorg being Xorg, eg, preventing VT access,
preventing input driver loading, preventing drivers doing modesetting.
The new DDX in contrast is straight-forward, clean code, only 2500 lines of
code and neatly self-contained." It does not yet have direct rendering or any acceleration, but those patches should come soon.